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Tag: Systray Icon

Just yesterday I installed the proprietary version of “Dropbox” on my ‘Debian / Jessie’ computer named ‘Phoenix’. I had the extra HD space to spare, and also had an existing Dropbox account to link to. But what I soon noticed, was the fact that I was suffering from the same problem many other users of ‘KDE 4′ were having with the newest Dropbox for Linux.

It seems that the Linux versions of Dropbox are tuned to work best under ‘Ubuntu’, not ‘Debian’. And in General, Ubuntu uses either ‘GNOME’ or ‘Unity’ as its desktop manager, which leaves many KDE users having to use the official Command Line Interface for Dropbox.

Mind you, this CLI is not bad as those go, but missing the System Tray Icon was annoying me. I had to install ‘libappindicator…’ as well as ‘python-appindicator’ from the package manager, and even after having done that, and after having restarted Dropbox using the CLI, the systray icon did not appear for me, because in recent Dropbox versions, only the ‘Nautilus’ support is included. Nautilus is the Ubuntu / GNOME counterpart, for what ‘Dolphin’ does under KDE. Luckily, there is an open-source Dolphin plugins package named

‘kdesdk-dolphin-plugins’

But that package assumes we already have Dropbox installed, and does not affect the system tray.

Further, I was disappointed by the fact that most of the other complaints I could Google involved KDE 5, while I needed to solve this problem with KDE 4.

And so after doing some more reading, I wrote the following script:

(Edit 03/31/2016 : ) I would like to thank Darwin Silva, who suggested a solution below, which works better for me, than the solution which I had first posted. Specifically, the solution by Mr. Silva allows Dropbox to animate the icon correctly, to show its status. I apologize for taking so long to test Mr. Silva’s solution, but often have limited time to go after all the things I should be doing on my own computers:

This seems to have done the trick for me. But be warned: This will serve us at best, Until the Next Reboot. Possibly, this script may need to be run more often. There is a workaround which fully automates that problem, but that workaround was not worth my while.

It may be possible to edit

~/.config/autostart/dropbox.desktop

But doing so is pointless, because Dropbox will overwrite that file, every time it updates itself…